Modern surgical procedures involve the use of a wide variety of supplies and implants, such as screws, plates, Kirschner wires (K-wires), anchors, and drill bits. It is critical to track and create a record of the type and quantity of the supplies used both inside and outside of the field during a particular surgical procedure for a variety of reasons, such as billing, quality assurance, accurate patient records, and determining the type and quantity of supplies that need to be reordered and restocked. Creating such an accurate record while a surgery is being performed is complicated by a variety of factors, including the wide variety of supplies that are used, difficulty of tracking what is used inside the sterile field, the lack of space on the tray to print the corresponding part number of each distinct screw type, the small size of such supplies, and the difficulty of distinguishing similar supplies from each other, all in real-time while the surgery is being performed. Traditional manual methods for tracking such supply usage, such as visually identifying the supplies that are used and writing down the type and quantity of such supplies on paper or manually recording such supplies in a database, tend to be slow, tedious, and error-prone. Errors in the record of the type and quantity of supplies and implants used can have a variety of negative consequences, including failure of the hospital to be reimbursed for all of the supplies that were used, failure to reorder the correct supplies, lag time in ordering restock supplies in a timely fashion, and errors in the patient's surgical history which can contribute to suboptimal care for the patient in the future.
What is needed, therefore, are improved techniques for tracking the type and quantity of supplies used during surgery.